When a rival city seeks to undermine Saraykeht, it employs a broader aspect of the andat's powers—the ability to cause spontaneous abortions—in an attempt to destroy Heshai's ability to control the andat and endanger Saraykeht's very existence. Caught up in the elaborate conspiracy are Amat, a wise older woman who does not realize until too late that her employer is a principal figure in the conspiracy, and three young people: Amat's assistant Liat, the poet Heshai's pupil Maati and Liat's lover Itani, a common laborer who, earlier in life, had rejected the opportunity to become a poet himself.

After escaping a brutal captivity, Amat will not be swayed in her determination to expose the conspiracy and seek justice for a young woman, Maj, who was its main victim. Others fear the retaliation and war that would result from the truth coming out would be far worse than the original crime and seek to stop her at all costs. As Amat pursues justice, Itani's origins complicate his relationships with Liat and Maati, Heshai struggles to fulfill his duties, and the increasingly sinister Seedless plays them all against each other, the story moves inexorably toward a conclusion that leaves none of the characters completely victorious but promises that most of them will have lives that point in new directions—a fate that will almost certainly not be the case for their city, Saraykeht.

Traditional pleasures, intriguing innovations

Daniel Abraham's first novel—"Book One of the Long Price Quartet"—is, on one level, a fine example of high fantasy that, in its presentation of the poet-andat relationship, offers a new and striking take on the age-old question of the power of magic and the responsibilities of the magician. But what is most satisfying about the book is the degree to which it bends the conventions of the genre in interesting ways.

The novel's prologue offers what could have been an utterly conventional scene of a promising pupil coping with the harsh but wise tutelage of elite masters, only to have the pupil walk away in disgust when he understands the heartless and shallow reality of the system the masters seek to perpetuate. When the thoughtful reader may be wondering about the seemingly rigid patriarchy of this imaginary world, a later view of the masters' village notes disapprovingly that there are no women there.

While there is enough external violence and intrigue to keep the plot moving, many of the characters' struggles are internal, and Abraham does not hesitate to take his time with both his characters and their struggles. And, not unimportantly, he manages to do all this in a relatively compact 336 pages.

The author does make a few questionable decisions. The inhabitants of this world communicate in part through elaborate "poses" that can convey extraordinarily subtle levels of meaning; as the novel progresses, this comes to seem more and more like unnecessary shorthand for otherwise well-developed characters. One wonders, too, why so terribly vulnerable a relationship as that between poet and andat has lasted so long as the summer cities' guarantee of prosperity and so long enabled them to regard "the wars of other nations ... [as] a curiosity." And there are a few too many scenes initially established in terms of weather reports.

But overall, A Shadow in Summer is an ambitious, intelligent and assured debut that should satisfy both readers hungry for the satisfactions of traditional fantasy and readers hungry for something more.